Don't believe the media, specially in cybersec
A thing I’ve noticed after years of doing this shit, is that media is almost NEVER telling the truth.
And that isn't some 1989 conspiracy type shit, this is something real that me and other people I know can seriously relate to.
Take this for example:
I found a bug in etcd.
Now ask 100 people in cybersecurity what etcd even is.
A lot of them probably won't know, or even know it exists in the first place.
Now compare that to something like NASA OpenMCT, CERN, or even XFEL.
People hear:
“NASA”
“CRITICAL”
“CVE”
And instantly imagine some insane 1 packet = root shell exploit chain.
Why?
Because media does not care about technical reality, it cares about attention.
Here is cybersecurity/normal media in monkey logic:
Monkey want banana.
Monkey asks human:
“What do I do so you give me banana?”
Human says:
“Give me drama, chaos, fear, and explain it in a way nobody understands so people react emotionally instead of logically.”
Monkey does that.
Human happy.
Monkey gets banana.
Done.
And I am NOT saying all news is fake.
But a lot of vulnerabilities are nowhere near as dramatic as headlines make them sound.
For example:
“Critical vulnerability requiring local access.”
Okay.
From an operational perspective, if the attacker already got local access through phishing or stolen creds, then realistically a huge amount of companies are already cooked anyway.
A shocking number of companies:
don't back up properly,
don't segment anything,
don't secure internal tooling,
not to mention companies will give claude code access to their ENTIRE system just to fix the most simple bug.
So in some real world scenarios, getting “root” changes almost nothing.
Of course these bugs still matter.
Of course they can be chained.
Of course RaaS groups use them. Even though they don't really need them all the time
But cybersecurity media presents everything like it is cyber apocalypse level infrastructure collapse when most real compromises happen because companies do unbelievably stupid shit at the most basic level.
That is the part that feels fake to me.